While April was a rough month for the stock market, cryptocurrency companies reportedly enjoyed smooth sailing.
As Bloomberg news reported Wednesday (April 30), companies such as Coinbase and crypto mining operation CleanSpark have risen sharply this month, enjoying double-digit increases even as the S&P 500 Index slipped 2.5%.
According to the report, this momentum comes as bitcoin has seen a 13% rally, restarting a debate over its status as an investor safe haven.
“The main driver has been obviously the spot price” for companies with bitcoin exposure, Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Bill Papanastasiou told Bloomberg. “And a lot of these miners as well, during this whole tariff debacle, were hit pretty hard, and now they’re rebounding.”
The report argued that the uptick carries some caveats. For example, many crypto stocks are down for the year, after a rough first quarter when bitcoin prices plunged, taking those companies with them. Crypto miners are especially hard hit as token-minting grows less profitable and tariffs threaten to ramp up hardware costs.
Among major companies, Galaxy Digital Holdings was the market leader, the report said, with shares up 40%, lifted by permission to list on the Nasdaq and an increase in AI-computing business from CoreWeave.
“Galaxy is very intriguing just given its, I would say, multitude of businesses it has going for it,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch said. “And obviously as the crypto market does well, their crypto-adjacent businesses do well.”
The news follows reports from earlier this week of a wave of crypto-related “megadeals” following the election of President Donald Trump. So far this year, crypto firms have reached 88 deals worth a total of $8.2 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from advisory firm Architect Partners. That is almost three times the transaction value from 188 deals in the crypto sector in the entirety of last year.
The president has named crypto-friendly regulators and has spoken of making the U.S. the “undisputed bitcoin superpower,” while the Republican-led Congress is at work on legislation to develop a regulatory framework for digital assets.
Among the president’s appointees is Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins, who last week criticized the regulatory policy of the Biden administration and promised to deal with the “long festering issues” surrounding digital assets and blockchain technology.
“Innovation has been stifled for the last several years due to market and regulatory uncertainty that unfortunately the SEC has fostered,” Atkins said recently during the SEC’s third Crypto Task Force roundtable.
